All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [303]
In 1943, the German economy staggered in the face of the combined pressures of shortages of coal, steel and manpower, compounded by massive destruction in the Ruhr achieved by Bomber Command and the USAAF. This was the first year in which the air offensive inflicted significant damage on the Nazi war machine. The July firestorm in Hamburg, created by the heaviest air raids in history, killed 40,000 people and destroyed 250,000 dwellings. ‘We were told the British [bombers] would avoid Hamburg because they would need the town and its harbour later on,’ one of its traumatised citizens, Mathilde Wolff-Monckeburg, wrote amid the rubble. ‘We lived in a fool’s paradise.’ By extraordinary exertions and the skills of Gen. Erhard Milch, the Luftwaffe managed to double its 1942 aircraft output, producing 2,200 combat aircraft a month by the summer of 1943. But its new models, the He177 and Me210, proved failures which wasted vital resources. The later marques of Bf109, which with the Focke-Wulf 190 remained the mainstays of Germany’s daylight air defence until the war’s end, were outclassed by Allied fighters. The August 1943 suicide of Luftwaffe chief of staff Hans Jeschonnek represented an admission of his service’s defeat.
Adam Tooze has made an important and persuasive case against Albert Speer’s claims to have created a German armaments production ‘miracle’ between 1942 and 1945. Many of Speer’s crisis expedients failed: for instance, the revolutionary Mk XXI U-boat was rushed into 1944 production so hastily that technical shortcomings rendered it incapable of useful service. A coal and steel famine persisted until the war’s end – the civilian allocation of fuel was cut to a level 15 per cent below that of the meagre British domestic ration. 1943 was the last year in which Germany still had access to Ukrainian metal ores. Merely fulfilling ammunition requirements absorbed more than half the army’s steel allocation, together with the services of 450,000 workers; a further 160,000 were building tanks, and 210,000 manufacturing other weapons.
Germany’s 1943 production of 18,300 armoured vehicles was far outstripped by the Allies’ 54,100 – 29,000 of these Russian – though Reich factories doubled deliveries between autumn 1942 and spring 1943. German ammunition output peaked in September 1944. From 1943 onwards, the Allies outgunned the Axis in every category of weapon, save tank armament, by ever-growing margins.
This makes it all the more remarkable that, in the face of so many handicaps and misjudgements, German forces were able to maintain a ferocious resistance until May 1945. In assessing the Third Reich’s industrial experience and the work of Speer and Milch – Jeschonnek’s successor as Luftwaffe chief of staff – historical revisionism can be overdone. By 1943, and indeed earlier, the Reich was set upon a course that could lead only to economic collapse. But Allied soldiers fighting the Germans would have derived little comfort from this knowledge as they faced devastating artillery and mortar barrages, and strove to challenge Tigers and Panthers with their own inferior tanks.
The weakness of the Allied bomber offensive was poor intelligence, which caused it to become, in Churchill’s rueful words, a bludgeon rather than a rapier. Ultra offered little help in divining what was happening inside Germany, because most industrial data was transmitted on paper or by landline rather than radio. Even as the destructive